In this seminar, Jessica Kritz, assistant professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Global Health, shared the stories of two cities—Accra, Ghana and Chico, California—facing unique, yet similar complex challenges. The Old Fadama community in Accra is an urban informal settlement and Chico is experiencing urban informal settlement resulting from the 2018 Camp Fire that was the deadliest and most destructive in California's history. Professor Kritz discussed how participatory action research can help resolve complex challenges involving human and social services delivery issues and emphasized that global cities can learn from each other’s efforts.
Learn more about the project in Ghana through the Change Agents: Applying Cross-Sector Collaboration and Women of Burden videos.
This event was co-sponsored by the Center for Global Health Science and Security, the School of Health’s Department of Health Management and Policy, and the Global Health Institute.
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Jessica Kritz is a participatory action researcher focused on cross-sector collaboration around complex health challenges. In the United States, her current projects involve COVID-19 response in a rural, Appalachian county in North Carolina and the homelessness crisis, created by wildfires, in Chico, California. Since 2015, Kritz has been the principal investigator on an empirical research project in Ghana to resolve complex health challenges. She worked with stakeholders and a local facilitator to educate stakeholders on the best evidence on cross-sector collaboration, and they used that evidence to develop a culturally appropriate cross-sector collaboration intervention to address the challenges. The research began with three stakeholders in Old Fadama, the largest urban slum in Accra. Now with data from 300 core stakeholders and more than 15,000 beneficiaries, the intervention has been replicated in other slums in Accra and Kumasi and rural communities in northern Ghana, using local resources. This cross-sector collaboration intervention worked where other, more traditional development projects did not: a low-cost, locally-designed tool that dramatically improved participation and resulted in numerous projects providing new services to Ghana's most vulnerable. The project is currently being scaled up with support of the Ghana national government.